Position - Dan holds a Personal Chair in the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, and has written or co-authored over 110 publications including many in premier journals (e.g. Science, PNAS, Nature) – see Publications below.

Detection of signatures of selection in human, bovine, salmon and chicken genomes

Origins of livestock as discerned using genetic diversity

Genetic basis of disease resistance in cattle

So what will be the topic of the presentation at GGI2017?
It is now known from ancient genomic investigation that massive migrations were part of cultural transitions in European prehistory. It is interesting to discover if Ireland and Portugal underwent these massive migrations. This lecture explores the evidence for such migrations and discusses the implications of the results for understanding the origins of modern populations and the languages they speak.

This year, the four lectures on Friday afternoon (including Dan's lecture) were made possible by the kind support of CITIGEN, a HERA Project. CITIGEN is an international collaborative research project that looks at the uses of modern and ancient genomic data in shaping public understandings of the past and our individual and collective identities.

Previous presentations

Each year since the inception of Genetic Genealogy Ireland, Dan has spoken about the ground-breaking work of his lab on ancient genomes and the relevance of the research to anthropology, genetic genealogy, & the study of disease.

Many ancient Irish skeletons are currently undergoing ancient DNA analysis. They vary in age and some are up to 6000 years old. 2016 saw the publication of the first of several papers reporting on the analysis of four such skeletons which were found in Rathlin Island and Ballynahatty. Further research is ongoing and Dan returns annually to GGI to give us an update on his team's research.